world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.’ This fragment has a maturity which
suggests that Keats might have equalled Wordsworth in magnitude as he did in qual-
ity. Tennyson thought Keats the greatest 19th-century poet, and T. S. Eliot, no friend
of the personal cult in poetry, judged Keats’s letters ‘certainly the most notable and
most important ever written by any English poet’. A few quotations may suffice to
indicate their lively quality. In a letter to a friend he wrote, thinking of Wordsworth:
‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – and if we do not agree, seems
to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive ....’
Elsewhere he wrote: ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved
upon our pulses.’ In another letter, he mentions to his brothers: ‘... that quality
which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is
when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irri-
table reaching after fact & reason – ’.
Romantic poetry changed priorities in English literature. Poetry is henceforth
about personal experience rather than the public and moral concerns of a classi-
cal/Christian Augustanism. In this general cultural shift to finding meaning in
personal rather than collective experience, poetry showed the way. And whereas
the 18th-century novel of Fielding focused on moral action, the 19th-century
novel chronicles the emotional development of characters – or of a leading char-
acter with whom we are expected to identify. The first-person narrator is no longer
an ironist.
nRomantic prose
Belles lettres
Romantic poetry invites a reverence which Romantic prose essayists, for all their
‘fine writing’, rarely show. In the year in which Keats addressed the nightingale as a
‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ on Hampstead Heath, Thomas Love Peacock wrote
that ‘We know ... that there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Naiads in the Regent’s-
canal.But barbaric manners and supernatural interventions are essential to poetry.
Either in the scene, or in the time, or in both, it must be remote from our ordinary
perceptions.’ This last is an 18th-century judgement on Romantic poetry, to be read
with Wordsworth’s Preface and Shelley’s Defence.
Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb(1775–1834) was indifferent to ideas,to politics and to the Lake
District. His anthology of the older dramatists was a contribution to later Romantic
tastes.Although his comments are often shrewd, Lamb treated Renaissance plays as
cabinets of poetic gems and curiosities. His preference for reading plays rather than
seeing them is only partly due to the low state of the theatre. Playwrights were for
him ‘dramatic poets’, whereas the Romantics were specimens of humanity who lived
about the time of Lamb. The purpose of his own familiar essays is to display his idio-
syncratic sensibility. The charm valued by his friends lingers in Old China and in The
Two Races of Men – these are ‘the men who borrow’ and ‘the men who lend’.
Coleridge appears as ‘Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations’; those books that
he returns are ‘enriched with annotations’.
R OMANTIC PROSE 245